Report: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660, GTX 1650 Arriving Later This Spring

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With the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti now in stores, Nvidia’s attention will turn to revamping the bottom of its product line. There are reports of both a GeForce GTX 1660 and GeForce GTX 1650 headed to market. The GTX 1660 is expected to drop in March, with the GTX 1650 supposedly debuting in April.

That’s the rumor from DigiTimes, which claims the new GPUs will debut on March 15 (GTX 1660) and April 30 (GTX 1650), at prices of $ 229 and $ 179 respectively. We don’t know much about the GTX 1650 yet, beyond that it’s rumored to be a 4GB GPU with a 128-bit memory bus. We’ve heard rumors that the GTX 1660 will function as an effective replacement for the GTX 1060, with 1280 GPU cores and 6GB of RAM, and a $ 229 list price.

The close configuration between the 1660 and the 1060 raises the question of how much performance gain we’ll see at that price point, but we’ll table that for now. The more interesting question is how these launches will hit AMD. Overall, Team Red should be able to compensate, though much depends on how aggressive Nvidia is with its positioning. We’ve heard some vague rumors of a price cut for the RX 590 that would drop it to ~$ 230. With the RX 590 outperforming the GTX 1060, that comparison could work for AMD, albeit at inevitably higher power consumption and noise.

Right now, AMD’s stronghold is in the $ 130 – $ 200 price bracket. New 4GB RX 570 cards have actually fallen as low as $ 129 according to Newegg, making them an absurdly good deal, especially with two free pack-in games. The RX 580 is down to $ 170 in one case, though the nominal price looks to be more like $ 190.

The GTX 1050 Ti simply isn’t competition for the RX 570. As this review from TechSpot shows, AMD’s RX 570 is, on average, 1.43x faster than the 1050 Ti.

The 1660 and 1650 will be interesting launches because they’ll tell us exactly how serious Nvidia is about taking on AMD’s low-price stronghold. Team Red hasn’t been particularly competitive in the high-end market for the past few years, but Polaris actually has teeth below the $ 200 price point, and the RX 570 has moved far enough down the stack that it won’t be threatened by a $ 180 GPU. RX 570 should be in a fairly good position no matter what, while the RX 580 / RX 590 split should allow AMD to target Nvidia’s GTX 1660 with one card or the other.